In 2013, we covered a ton of new apps, resources, and more for designers and developers. In fact, we covered hundreds of resources!

So rather than you having to go back through our archive of posts, we’ve gathered up the best of what was new over the past year in one place! We’re not including everything (after all, some resources are no longer available, sites may have changed hands, apps may no longer be active, etc.), but rather have put together a true “best of” compilation, with more than 130 entries! Including our favorite featured font from each month!

Enjoy, and let us know in the comments what your favorite new resources were for the year!

Apiary.io

Apiary.io is a REST API tool that makes it easy to create documentation and other tools for your users to use your API. It even includes tools to get the community to create your documentation for you on GitHub.

Prose

Prose is a web interface for managing your text-based GituHub repository content. It’s a great option for managing your blog or making quick updates to your code, and is particularly useful for Jekyll sites hosted on GitHub Pages with Markdown text preview and syntax reference.

Vagrant

Need a lightweight, reproducible, portable development environment? Vagrant has you covered. It works with Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, with a simple-to-use installer, and easy configuration.

Maskew

Maskew is a JavaScript library for skewing the shapes of elements. It’s mobile-friendly, has no dependencies, and is less than 5k.

Elusive Icons

Elusive Icons are 271 vector icons specifically developed for Bootstrap, but since it’s a web font, it will work with custom projects, too.

Profound Grid

Profound Grid is a responsive grid system for creating both fixed and fluid layouts, built with SCSS. You can add or remove columns as needed, change column and gutter widths, and much more.

Junior

Junior is a front-end framework for building mobile apps with HTML5 that have a native look and feel. It includes CSS3 transitions that are optimized for mobile performance, swipable carousels, and more.

Centurion

Centurion is a responsive web framework that was built using SASS and CSS3 media queries. It uses semantic HTML5, and even makes it easy to build quick prototypes.

Framer

Framer is a modern prototyping tool for building and testing complex interactions and rich animations. It’s a good alternative to Flash, Quartz, Composer, and Keynote.

Photobox

Photobox is a jQuery image gallery script with hardware-accelerated CSS3 transitions and animations, along with a pretty UI and an easy-to-use UX.

Dropzone.js

Dropzone.js is an open source, simple drag and drop file uploader with image preview. It’s easy to set up (especially if you use Component, as you can add it as a dependency) and implement as either a form or programmatically.

Notism

Notism is a great tool for working on visual content with a team. You can upload, stack, and review visual project ideas, create working prototypes of static templates, discuss drafts, and more. There are even tools for signing off on layouts.

Dropify

Dropify makes it easy to make files available for download on your Facebook fan page. There’s a free plan available (which doesn’t offer Like-gating), as well as premium plans. It’s great for artists, authors, creatives, brands, and small businesses.

Onepager

Onepager lets you easily build simple websites for small businesses. The resulting sites work great on both desktops and mobile devices, are cloud-hosted, include custom form capability, and are search-engine friendly. Starter sites are only $8/month, with more robust plans available.

Kirby

Kirby is a file-based CMS that’s easy to setup and use, and incredibly flexible. It uses your design and your templates, doesn’t require a database, and supports Markdown syntax, among other features. It’s just $39 per site.

QuoteRobot

QuoteRobot makes it easy to create professionally designed proposals, invoices, and quotes. It works well with Highrise, FreshBooks, SalesForce, Google Apps, and Xero, and only costs $10/month after the 30 day free trial.

Hint.css

Hint.css is a SASS tooltip library which uses only HTML/CSS (no JavaScript) for creating simple tooltips using data-* attribute, pseudo elements, content property, and CSS3 transitions. It degrades gracefully without any transitions in browsers where CSS3 transitions aren’t supported.

Ink

Ink is an easy to use toolkit for creating web interfaces. It uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for building layouts, dispaying common interface elements, implementing content-centric interactive features, and more.

Cool Kitten

Cool Kitten is a beta framework that includes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that’s responsive and includes parallax scrolling support.

Baseline.js

Baseline.js helps maintain your vertical rhythm (set by your typographic baseline) despite oddly-sized images in your articles and pages.

Mailstrom

Mailstrom is a tool to help you clean out your email by powering through your messages in seconds. It’s currently in beta and has an unlimited free trial, though it will later be available by subscription.

Do

Do is an easy to use team project manager that makes it simple to get all of your work done. In addition to the web app, there are also mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

Galleria

Galleria is an image gallery framework built in JavaScript that makes it easy to create beautiful galleries for web and mobile devices.

Koken

Koken is a free CMS for creatives that makes managing creative content simple. It has a desktop-like interface, and has powerful tools for working with virtually any kind of content from text to images to video.

Prevue

Prevue is a free way to present your concepts online and even get feedback. You can password protect your image sets and send custom URLs to your clients.

TypeUp

TypeUp is a Compass extension that takes the font size and line length you specify and turns it into a set of CSS rules for a vertical baseline in ems.

jQuery Nested

jQuery Nested is a plugin for creating a gap-free, multi-column grid layout. It works on a variety of devices, and grid elements animate to rearrange when the viewport size changes.

Hook.js

Hook.js enables “pull to refresh” on websites, just like it works in mobile applications. Just scroll down a bit and then back up and your page will refresh.

Gumroad

Gumroad is a platform for selling digital files directly online. They handle the hosting, payment, and delivery for you, quickly and securely.

Gridwax

Gridwax is a bookmarklet that lets you easily add an adjustable vertical baseline to any site right in your browser. Just install the bookmark, click on it, and then adjust the height with your arrow keys.

Photolettering

Photolettering is a free iOS app that lets you add text to photos you take within the app or images from your camera roll. It features some great fonts from House Industries, including Elephant, Kerpow, and Aztek.

UX Apprentice

UX Apprentice teaches you the principles of UX design with a layered approach, including discovery, strategy, and design. It includes information on the core principles of each layer, as well as real life examples and resources for each.

dsgnjbs

dsgnjbs aggregates the best design jobs from a variety of design websites, including Dribbble, Behance, Smashing Magazine, 37 Signals, and more.

SVG Patterns Gallery

The SVG Patterns Gallery is a collection of SVG patterns complete with code. SVG images are smaller than bitmap images generally, and stay sharp on high resolution displays.

Flat+3D Mockup Kit

This Flat+3D Mockup Kit makes it easy to create attractive mockups for your apps on a wide variety of devices. There are free and paid kits included, depending on which devices you need.

SuperBox

SuperBox is a jQuery plugin that works as a static image gallery that reveals the full size version when an image is clicked on.

Mobify.js

Mobify.js is an open source library that makes it easy to adapt your site for any device. It captures and manipulates your site’s DOM before resources are downloaded, enabling resource control, conditional loading, and more.

Animatable

Animatable lets you easily animate all sorts of properties, including background-color, background-position, border-width, font-size, color, border-radius, opacity, and much more.

Bespoke.js

Bespoke.js is a DIY presentation micro-framework that offers a number of different slide animations, including coverflow, cube, and carousel, among others.

LayoutIt!

LayoutIt! simplifies building your front-end code with Bootstrap, complete with a drag-and-drop interface. You get high-quality HTML5 code starting from any of their basic templates.

Flat UI Colors

Building a flat UI? Flat UI Colors is a tiny app that makes it easy to grab the colors from Flat UI for your project.

Resemble.js

Resemble.js is an HTML5 canvas and JavaScript app that analyzes and compares images. Just drag and drop images into the app and it will highlight their diferences.

Web Colour Data

Web Colour Data makes it simple to pull color data from any URL, complete with charts showing the prevalence of each color used.

Userium

Userium is an interactive usability checklist that includes categories for user experience, the site’s homepage, accessibility, navigation, links, search, and more.

The Productivity Manifesto

The Productivity Manifesto is a free ebook filled with tips for becoming way more productive. Just sign up for the free newsletter for a link to download the PDF.

Nanoc

Nanoc is a static site builder that works for building everything from a small personal site to a large corporate site. It even works for blogs.

Perspective Mockups

Perspective Mockups is a set of Photoshop actions for creating more interesting mockups for presenting your ideas. The results are crisp and unique.

Ghost

Ghost is a free, open source, simple blogging platform. It puts the focus squarely on publishing and your content.

Premailer

Premailer is an online pre-flight app for HTML email creation. Just paste in your URL or source, add a query string to append to links, and add options (like removing unused IDs, comments, or classes), and submit.

Codifferous

Codifferous helps you review code faster and more effectively. It tracks how much you’ve reviewed within the source code, and even lets you mark whether each line is accepted or rejected. Public projects are free, while private projects will eventually require a small fee.

Stocksy

Stocksy is a stock photo service that offers high-quality, royalty-free photos that are unlike most stock photos and exclusive to Stocksy. Photos start at just $10.

Videry

Videry is a curated collection of videos for web designers. There are videos on a variety of topics featured, including CSS, innovation, psychology in design, typography, and much more.

Pure

Pure is a set of responsive CSS modules that you can use in all of your website and app projects. It includes modules for grids, forms, buttons, tables, menus, and more.

430+ Free Storyboard Illustrations

This collection of 430+ Free Storyboard Illustrations is free for you to use for your personal projects (it’s not made to be used in final production projects). It includes a vector file, as well as a PNG file.

Red Pen

Red Pen makes it super fast and easy to get feedback from your clients or team members. Just drag your design onto the upload area, share the short URL you’re provided with, and get live, annotated feedback. And there’s no logging in, project management, or other useless features.

Designers Complaining

Designers Complaining is an awesome Tumblr blog that catalogs complaints from designers from across the web. Most recently has been a huge number of complains about iOS 7.

Flatdoc

Need a website for documenting your open source project? Flatdoc is here to help. It lets you create a website fast, using Markdown.

Explore. Create. Repeat.

Explore. Create. Repeat. is an online weekly magazine for the creative community, to inspire and offer insight. You can subscribe by email or read it online.

Froont

Froont lets you design websites right in your browser, using a simple drag and drop interface. This lets you see your site exactly as your visitors will.

Thincons

Thincons is a $7 set of icons inspired by iOS7. There are 77 icons in all, and you can get a sampling of them in exchange for a Tweet if you don’t want to pay for the full set.

Golden Ratio Typography Calculator

The Golden Ratio Typography Calculator is a simple tool for creating better typography. Just enter your font size and content width, as well as an optional CPL (characters per line), and get a number of typographic recommendations.

Style Guide Boilerplate

This Style Guide Boilerplate is geared toward designers and developers who want to roll their own frameworks to handle common components they use between projects.

Square Market

Square Market is a new ecommerce solution from Square. It costs nothing extra over the regular cost of Square payment processing, and the storefronts provided are modern and well-designed.

Gridism

Gridism is a responsive grid system that’s simple and easy to use. It stacks grid units on mobile device screens, and scales up to 978 or 1140px (your choice).

Later.js

Later.js lets you define complex schedules and quickly calculate future or past schedule occurrences. It works client-side or with Node.js.

Topcoat

Topcoat is a CSS framework for building clean and fast web apps. It includes a number of useful components, is themeable, and includes a PSD with all of the components in the code base.

DevDocs

DevDocs is an API documentation reader with a consistent, organized interface. You can look through documentation for HTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript, jQuery and more, all from a single place.

Typewolf

Looking for typography inspiration? Then Typewolf is just the site. Not only does it provide plenty of online typographical inspiration, but it also identifies the fonts used for you.

Tiff

Tiff is a type tool that lets you visually contrast the differences between two typefaces. It currently works with Google Web Fonts, as well as your system fonts.

Bytesize

Bytesize is a new weekly podcast about tech, design, and development. You can also read summaries of the week’s news on the site, along with links to the original articles.

Responsive Web CSS

Responsive Web CSS makes it quick and easy to layout your pages for responsive sites for a variety of devices.

Snapnote.io

Snapnote.io makes it incredibly easy to share and annotate images and screenshots. Just drag and drop your image onto the page, use the built-in tools for annotation, and then share it.

Pico

Pico is a simple, fast, flat file CMS, meaning that it uses no database. It uses the Twig templating engine for powerful and flexible themes, and is completely free and open source.

Butterick’s Practical Typography

Butterick’s Practical Typography is a comprehensive guide to typography that covers everything from what makes good typography to more basic things like accented characters.

Mailparser.io

Mailparser is an easy way to automate your daily email routine. Just set up your data extraction rules, and tell it how to handle the results.

CSS Zen Garden

CSS Zen Garden has been around for awhile, but has recently been reworked as an HTML5 template. It’s a great demonstration of what can be done with CSS-based design.

Cloud Cannon

Cloud Cannon lets you crate a hosted CMS from your HTML and CSS in seconds. It has a 30-day free trial.

Type Hunting

Type Hunting is a curated collection of vintage typography examples. You’ll find everything from retro t-shirts to antique packaging, old signs, and more.

iOS 7-Inspired Line Icons

These iOS 7-Inspired Line Icons are a great set of more than 80 icons in the style of iOS7. You can use them however you like as long as you don’t redistribute them without permission.

Bootstrap Magic

Bootstrap Magic makes it easy to create your own Bootstrap theme. It’s made with Bootstrap 3 and Angular JS, and gives you live preview, a colorpicker, Google Webfonts, and much more.

StatusPage.io

StatusPage.io is an easy way to create a status page for your website or app. It includes custom branding, support for various types of system status messages, and more.

Just Delete Me

Just Delete Me gives you the info you need to delete your account from a variety of websites and services, including Amazon, Blogger, Facebook, Gumroad, and more.

Web Tracing Framework

Web Tracing Framework is a collection of rich tools for analyzing and visualizing your web apps. It’s available as either a Chrome or Firefox extension.

Random User Generator

The Random User Generator will create a random user for you that you can use as placeholders in your projects. It works with jQuery and other methods.

Assemble

Assemble lets you combine the power of frameworks like Foundation and Bootstrap for your projects, to create exactly the kind of framework and end result you need.

Spectrum

Spectrum is a Mac and iOS app for designers and developers that makes it easy to intuitively design color schemes. It uses established color theory, making it much simpler to create aesthetically pleasing palettes.

Noise Texture Generator

If you need a textured background for your next project, be sure to check out this Noise Texture Generator. Just enter values for the noise opacity, density, background color, and dimensions, and then download your custom pattern.

Appmaker

Appmaker, from Mozilla, is a drag-and-drop mobile app creator that works right in your browser. It’s in pre-alpha release, so expect some bugs, but it looks promising.

Hiro

Hiro is an online notepad where you can safely store your ideas and notes throughout the day. It always opens where you left off, securely syncs across your devices, and it’s free.

Sagan Ipsum

Sagan Ipsum is a lorem ipsum generator that gives you Carl Sagan quotes about the universe.

Mobile Web Best Practices

Mobile Web Best Practices will help you ask the right questions and solve problems you may encounter when designing for the mobile web. It’s broken down to cover strategy, user experience, visual design, and development, and has additional resources and a FAQ section.

Google Web Designer

Google Web Designer is a new responsive HTML5 website creator from Google that lets you design in a WYSIWYG environment or dive right into the code.

Listify

Listify is a simple little app that makes it easy to turn a group of lines into an HTML list, saving you time and effort.

Harpoon

Trying to figure out how much money you need to make? Harpoon simplifies that, giving you financial planning advice and metrics for managing your income. It’s not ready yet, but you can sign up for updates.

StackEdit

Need an online Markdown editor? StackEdit lets you write and edit Markdown files, as well as save them to Google Drive or Dropbox to have your documents available in the cloud any time.

Raw

Raw is an open source web app that lets you create vector-based visualizations in vector and raster formats to embed on your website. It’s built on D3.js, and has a simple user interface.

Start Bootstrap

Start Bootstrap is a collection of free, open source HTML starter templates for Bootstrap. They’re ready to use, even with Bootstrap 3.

GlyphSearch

GlyphSearch makes it simple to search for icons from Glyphicons, Ionicons, and Font Awesome. You can also browse icons on the site.

Free Vector Maps

Free Vector Maps gives you access to tons of vector maps of countries all over the world. They can be used for free under the Creative Commons Attribution License, or can be purchased for unlimited usage.

Slidr.js

Slidr.js is a lightweight, simple JS library, with no dependencies, for adding slide transitions to your page.

Merry Icons

Merry Icons is a set of 100 royalty-free hand drawn icons for Christmas, all for just $16.

Knock

Knock is an innovative way to unlock your Mac using your iPhone. All you have to do is knock on your iPhone’s screen and your Mac will unlock, no password required.

Temper

Temper is a simple app to let you create questions to embed on your website to get feedback so that you can better adapt to what your visitors want. Plans start at just $12/month.

Streme

Streme is an easy way to keep a collaborative stream of links, with no signup required. You can add links to videos, music, and more.

Silk

Silk is a sharing platform for creating collections about anything. Just create a site, add facts to your pages, and create overviews and visualizations.

Fleep

Fleep is a chat program, pinboard, and file drawer all rolled into one, available online and for iOS.

Onor

Onor is a team recognition platform that simplifies the process of encouraging and rewarding your team members.

Design Faves

Design Faves is new site that offers up plenty of design inspiration every day. There are posts about creativity, general design, art, architecture, and much more.

Type Scale

Type Scale is a visual calculator for creating typographical scales for your designs. Just enter in your base size and what scale you want to use, and it will give you the best sizes for your headers, body, and other text.

Color Template

Color Template is a quick tutorial that will teach you how to choose the best colors for your designs. It starts with the color wheel, and progresses through a number of other color theory topics.

Ink

Ink is a responsive HTML email framework from Zurb. It lets you quickly create emails that will work on any device or client, even Outlook.

Kanye vs Creative Director

Kanye vs Creative Director is a fun look at quotes that were either spoken by a creative director or Kanye West. See if you can guess which one, or submit your own quote.

Crowdhoster

Crowdhoster is a service for launching your own crowdfunding page without any coding. You can customize it however you want, and they handle all the payment processing for you and provide you with an admin dashboard.

Syte

Syte is a simple but powerful way to build a personal website with social integrations like Twitter, GitHub, Instagram, Dribbble, and many more. It even works with WordPress.com or Tumblr for blog integration.

We Work Remotely

We Work Remotely is a new job board from 37signals for finding the best telecommuting jobs out there.

Beyond Ink

Beyond Ink is a monthly design podcast for those in the creative or web industries to discuss what they do.

Slides

Slides from Markdown is a simple way to share your thoughts with the world. Slides can be customized easily, with different fonts, font colors, and more.

Exposure

Exposure is a tool for creating photo narratives online. It’s a great way for photographers to publish their work in a more meaningful but effortless way.

Cassannet (free)

Cassannet is an art deco style font based on the lettering style seen on Cassandre Posters, and includes titling alternates, standard and discretionary ligatures, and small caps. It also includes regular, bold, and outline weights.

Roccia ($10)

Roccia is an experimental sans serif typeface with two styles and all uppercase characters.

Hello Denver (free)

Hello Denver is a free font from Good Apples design studio with stencil-like letterforms.

Naive Inline ($20)

Naive Inline is a handwritten serif type family with three weights. It was a very Parisian feel, and allows for a ribbed or full bicolor interior.

Cylburn (name your price)

Cylburn, from Lost Type Co-Op, is a semi-connected script font based structurally on Roundhand, but with a pointed brush and restrained tension.

Lunch Box ($24)

Lunch Box is a unique, handdrawn typeface with infinite customizable options. It also comes with a custom set of small caps, each with four style variations, and stylistic alternatives.

Core Circus ($84)

Core Circus is a layered type family of eight 2D typefaces that can be combined for 3D effects.

Woodwarrior (tweet/FB post)

Woodwarrior is a modern display typeface with geometric letterforms and a very bold style.

Appareo ($21)

Appareo is an imperfect, worn serif font inspired by vintage book typefaces. It comes in three weights, with varying degrees of distress.

Revanche ($29)

Revanche is a distressed font, based on old wall stencils, with a subversive military feel to it.

Pacific Northwest ($60)

Pacific Northwest is a handwritten font that’s fun and comes in two styles (regular and rough).

Seashore Pro ($59)

Seashore Pro is a feminine script with thicker horizontals that create a wave-like appearance. It’s loosely based on the left-leaning penmanship of the late 19th century.

What was your favorite app or resource of the year? Did we miss something you think should have been included? Let us know in the comments.

Become a Successful eBook Author with ‘Authority’ – only $19!

During the early days of the Web, there wasn’t a standard font that could be rendered across all platforms. However, some fonts — like Arial, Helvetica, and Times New Roman — were more likely to be installed in a person’s computer. These popular system fonts are called Web-safe fonts. It was the best practice in web design to stick to them.

Things have changed. It’s now safe to use Web fonts — a technique for rendering any remote font file in a web page using @font-face. This give us more creative freedom and a much wider range of font options.

The @font-face rule has been around for close to 13 years, first seen and supported in Internet Explorer 5.5^[1].

And @font-face has been formally included in the most recent version of W3C’s CSS standards (CSS3) — it was taken out in CSS2.1 — and so modern browsers (e.g. Chrome, Safari, IE, and Firefox) support the rule.

And with services like the free Google Fonts API, implementing Web fonts is easy. For instance, using the Google Fonts web service, it takes two lines of CSS to render even a relatively unknown font such as Bigelow Rules in the vast majority of browsers:

@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Bigelow+Rules);
    body { font-family: 'Bigelow Rules'; }
    

But even with near-perfect support of the @font-face rule, as a good practice, we should still use CSS font stacks. Moreover, our CSS font stacks should still include Web-safe fonts as well as generic font families like sans-serif and serif.

For example, even if we were to use the most popular font on Google’s Web font service (which is currently Open Sans), we should still use a CSS font stack that includes similar Web-safe fonts, with the last declaration in the stack being a generic font family (sans-serif in the case of Open Sans):

body {font-family: "Open Sans", "Arial", "Helvetica", sans-serif; }
    

In Chrome, this is the fallback-rendering sequence:

As shown above, using a good font stack assures us that we are gracefully degrading our HTML text in case our chosen font is for some reason unable to load.

Why We Still Need a Web-safe Font Stack

Web-safe fonts and CSS font stacks seem like outdated Web design practices, especially since @font-face has great support.

Right now close to 90% of the Internet’s users use a browser that supports @font-face^[2].

But if you’ve ever considered dropping your CSS font stacks, below are a few reasons that might change your mind.

Incomplete Fonts

If certain characters in your font are not available, the browser will attempt to render those unavailable characters using the next font in the stack. But if you don’t have a font stack, it will use the browser’s default standard font.

For instance, the Libre Baskerville font doesn’t have the ™ character.

The first example below shows how the missing character renders in Chrome without a font stack, while the second example stacks "Times New Roman" and serif in the style rule:

At least with a good font stack, the ™ character looks similar to the preferred Libre Baskerville font.

Network Issues

Loading a remote font using @font-face requires an Internet connection. If the web server responsible for serving the font is unavailable or is down for maintenance, the browser will use its default standard text, unless you specify a Web-safe font in your CSS font stack.

For Google Chrome, the standard text (on Windows) is "Times New Roman". This can be bad news if we were using a sans-serif font, and the web server or the content delivery network where the font file is located goes down.

For example, check out this mockup of a web design that uses the PT Sans font:

If our font stack didn’t have Web-safe fonts in the stack and a network interruption happened, our web page would render like this (in Chrome):

The web page looks completely different because Times New Roman greatly affects the visual message of the design.

But if we used a font stack that included Web-safe fonts, we can mitigate some of the aesthetic issues that come with network problems.

Using the font stack:

font-family: "PT Sans", "Helvetica", "Arial", sans-serif;
    

We are able to lower the visual impact caused by a network interruption:

@font-face Can Be Turned Off Client-Side

Some web browsers provide the option to disable the downloading of font files.

In most cases, disabling remote font files in a web browser is obfuscated, but it’s possible. Here’s a forum post for turning off remote font downloading in Firefox and Chrome, and here’s one for Opera.

Why would someone want to disable remote fonts? To speed up web page load times, which is especially desirable for Internet users who have slow Internet connections.

To illustrate how Web fonts impact Web performance, let’s use a display font such as "Lobster Two".

The following markup was used to test  the Lobster Two payload locally using an HTML document called "lobster-two-payload.html":

<html>
<head>
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lobster+Two:400,400italic,700,700italic' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
<style>
body { font-family:"Lobster Two"; } 
</style>
</head>
<h1>Display Font</h1>
</html>
    

The test conditions are a broadband Internet connection and an unprimed cache (meaning that the browser cache was cleared for each test).

#1 result. Total time: 972ms

#2 result. Total time: 1.61s

#3 result. Total time: 1.36s

In the condition tested, it would take an average of 1.3 seconds to render the <h1> tag fully for someone who has an unprimed cache.

This means staring at a blank page for 1.3 seconds before the user can read the text, because Chrome’s default behavior is to show no text while the font is still loading^[3].

Consider that 1.3 seconds is the average load time using a broadband connection to download the font files from Google’s servers. Imagine how long it would take in less-than-ideal situations, such as slow mobile networks and using a shared-hosting server to serve the font.

Without the Web font, the same document would finish rendering in an average of only 0.012 seconds, which means the font increased the load time by 10,733%. That is a hefty price to pay for rendering a novelty display font that’s not functional enough to be used for critical website content. That’s why some users choose to disable remote font files from loading.

If we want to gracefully degrade our web design in situations where the user has chosen to disable remote font files, we should use Web-safe fonts in our font stack.

It must be noted here that you don’t have to load the entire font family. And if you use the Google Font service, you can selectively load just the font variations you need.

Web-safe fonts = Cheap and Easy Graceful Degradation

Though it’s rare, @font-face isn’t supported in a few web browsers, especially old ones.

Earlier, I mentioned that 90% of Internet users use a browser that supports @font-face.

Not having a font stack that includes Web-safe fonts and a generic font family means that we aren’t controlling how our web design degrades for at least 10% of the Internet’s users.

The time and effort required to use a simple CSS font stack that includes Web-safe fonts is very small, so there’s little reason not to continue doing it.

References

1. The SitePoint CSS reference for @font-face has a table showing @font-face as being supported in Internet Explorer 5.5+.
2. According to The Can I use @font-face Web fonts compatibility table, 89.84% of the Internet population uses a browser that has full or partial @font-face support. This data is from StatCounter Global Stats, November 2013.
3. See the description of the browser-specific Web font rendering behaviors on the Google Developers site. This is outdated because as of Firefox 4 (officially released March 2011), loading Web fonts now behave similar to WebKit-based browsers.

Related Content

• The Essential Guide to @font-face
• A Guide to Google Font API
• Comic Sans: The Font Everyone Loves to Hate
• Related categories: Web Standards and Web Design

About the Author

Alexander Dawson is a freelance web designer, author and recreational software developer specializing in web standards, accessibility and UX design. As well as running a business called HiTechy and writing, he spends time on Twitter, SitePoint’s forums and other places, helping those in need.

The post Why We Still Need Web-safe Fonts appeared first on Six Revisions.

A bubble formed around social media in 2013. But other companies, nations, and ordinary people struggled to find advantage in technological change.

By Antonio Regalado

In this article we continue our exploration of Photoshop CC, Edge Reflow CC and the new Generator plugin with the intention of quickly exporting web layouts from Photoshop into Reflow in a web ready format. As you'll see, the process needs some work.

Microsoft's 'Midori' project, a product of the software giant’s skunkworks OS project built on an equally secret new language.

A reader recently wrote in asking me what the DOM was. They said they've heard it mentioned and alluded to, but aren't sure they really understand it.

We can fix that.

But the HTML you write is parsed by the browser and turned into the DOM.

View Source just shows you the HTML that makes up that page. It's probably the exact HTML that you wrote.

It might look like different code if, for example, you work in template files in a backend language and don't look at the compiled HTML output very often. Or there is a "build process" that happens after you write your HTML and the code is put out to the live website. Perhaps that HTML is compressed or otherwise changed.

View Source is a little weird actually. The only people that would care to look at that code are developers and all the major browsers have built in developer tools now. It has probably out-lived its usefulness.

When you're looking at the panel in whatever DevTools you are using that shows you stuff that looks like HTML, that is a visual representation of the DOM! We made it!

Well, yeah, it does. It was created directly from your HTML remember. In most simple cases, the visual representation of the DOM will be just like your simple HTML.

But it's often not the same...

When is the DOM different than the HTML?

Here's one possibility: there are mistakes in your HTML and the browser has fixed them for you. Let's say you have a <table> element in your HTML and leave out the required <tbody> element. The browser will just insert that <tbody> for you. It will be there in the DOM, so you'll be able to find it with JavaScript and style it with CSS, even though it's not in your HTML.

The most likely case though, is...

JavaScript can manipulate the DOM

Imagine you have an empty element like this in your HTML:

<div id="container"></div>

Then later in your HTML, there is a bit of JavaScript:

<script>
      var container = document.getElementById("container");
      container.innerHTML = "New Content!";
    </script>

Even if you don't know JavaScript, you can reason that bit of code out. On the screen you'll see New Content! rather than nothing, because that empty div was filled with some, ahem, new content.

If you use DevTools to check out the visual representation of the DOM, you'll see:

<div id="container">New Content!</div>

Which is different than your original HTML or what you would see in View Source.

Ajax and Templating

Let's not go off the deep end here, but I bet you can imagine if you were to use Ajax to snag content from elsewhere and put it onto the page, the DOM is going to be very different than your original HTML. The same with loading in data of some sort and using client side templating.

Try going to Gmail and viewing source. It's just a bunch of scripts and data from the original page load. Barely recognizable compared to what you see on the screen.

JavaScript vs. the DOM

JavaScript is a language that the browser reads and does stuff with. But the DOM is where that stuff happens. In fact a lot of what you might think of as a "JavaScript Thing" is more accurately a "DOM API".

For instance, we can write JavaScript that watches for a mouseenter event on an element. But that "element" is really a DOM node. We attach that listener via a DOM property on that DOM node. When that event happens, it's the DOM node that emits that event.

Appologies if I worded any of that stuff incorrectly. But you get the point I hope. The DOM is the lifeblood here. It's where everything goes down in the browser. JavaScript is just the syntax, the language. It can be used totally outside the browser with no DOM APIs at all (see Node.js).

This article isn't nearly nerdy and in-depth enough for me.

Well, the DOM stands for "Document Object Model" blah blah blah. I didn't want to (and am not qualified) to write that article. Here's some meaty ones:

• W3C: What is the Document Object Model?
• MDN: Introduction - Document Object Model
• Wikipedia: Document Object Model

What is the DOM? is a post from CSS-Tricks